Is it worth upgrading to NVIDIA’s newest GPU?

NVIDIA announced their new GTX 1070 Ti graphics card at the end of October, and finally we can give you our take on NVIDIA’s latest Pascal-based GPU. For a while there AMD looked like it could finally overtake the GTX 1070’s performance with the RX Vega 56, which could go head-to-head with NVIDIA’s venerable card and win (on certain occasions).

But NVIDIA’s not content to let sleeping dogs lie, and has released a bumped-up version of the GTX 1070, which is the subject of our review today. It’s a clear message at AMD and their long awaited GPU, and while it’s not the GTX 1060 Ti that we’ve waited for, it’s still a great card for people who don’t want to pay top dollar for the GTX 1080.

Design: Every bell and whistle a hardcore gamer could ask for

Our review card came by way of Colorful’s iGame GPU product line, and what a card it is. It’s a massive card which isn’t surprising, considering that the GTX 1070 Ti lineup sits right behind NVIDIA’s top-end offering. Since it’s such a massive card, it’ll occupy three slots in your board so be prepared for that particular if you ever decide to buy this monster.

As far as aesthetics go, the iGame GTX 1070 Ti Vulcan X has a lot of angular, aggressive lines as well as LED lighting spread across its body. Users can customize the lighting on the card if they wish, which is nice.

The most interesting feature of the new card is the LCD display on its side.Dubbed the iGame Status Monitor, that little LCD allow users a quick way to check the GPU’s status, which includes core clocks, core temps, load line status as well as memory usage. It’s a nice touch, and is another element that rig builders can use when showing off their builds since not every card has this particular feature.

There’s a bunch of display options on the rear of the card, including a single DVI port for legacy displays, HDMI 2.0 port, as well as three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors. The button on the rear is for the dual-BIOS feature of the card.

Three coolers are spread across its body, with the second one partially hidden. Colorful’s Sorizer cooler consists of the three fans as well as six heatpipes and a redesigned thermal solution that reduces thermal resistance and enhances heat conduction efficiency. The three dual ball-bearing fans are 92mm in diameter which Colorful says cools 86% more surface area than comparable double-groove coolers.

The iGame GTX 1070 Ti Vulcan X requires two 8-pin power connectors to work with Colorful specifying 375w of power draw on the card itself.

Architecture: A slightly bumped up GTX 1070

ust like the original GTX 1070, the GTX 1070 Ti is based on the same GP104 GPU. The CUDA core count is naturally, higher to make the GPU more powerful, coming in at 2,432, which is very close to the 2,560 count on the GTX 1080. The GPU also has 8GB of GDDR5 memory, putting it on the same footing as the non-TI version, which leaves the GTX 1080 as the sole card that has the GDDR5X type of memory.

Surprisingly the core clock of the GTX 1070 Ti is the same as the GTX 1080 at 1,607MHz, though boost clocks differ at 1,683MHz VS 1,733MHz. Memory speeds are pegged at 8GHz as opposed to the GTX 1080’s 10GHz, though TDP for both cards are the same, at 180W.

Performance: Slightly lower than a GTX 1080

With a few components shy of a full-fledged GTX 1080, the GTX 1070 Ti performed similarly to its bigger brother, and was only a few FPS shy of the performance of its more expensive brethren. With all games set on ultra, the card had no problem pushing pixels past 60 FPS, and even on 1440p gaming the card will probably still deliver excellent frame rates and synthetic numbers.

Just like before our test system comprises of an Intel Core i5 6400 Skylake processor, an ASUS B150M Pro Gaming motherboard, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, 256GB SSD and a 5TB 7200RPM HDD.

Verdict: Trounces the competition handily

NVIDIA’s latest card manages to stamp out the only bright spot in AMD’s lineup, and will probably be easier to acquire than the rarer-than-hen’s-teeth Vega GPUs that are supposedly available in the market. The GTX 1070 Ti’s performance over the regular GTX 1070 isn’t as clear cut as we’d like, though we feel that it’s around 20% faster with some games.

Is it as fast than the GTX 1080? No – there’s still quite a bit of performance gap between the two, though you could probably reach stock GTX 1080 speeds with overclocking.